The Victorian serial killer you probably haven't heard of...

LUCY WORSLEY ON A MISSION

- BY JAMES RAMPTON

IN AN IMPOVERISHED part of Victorian London in the late 1880s, an utterly depraved serial killer carried out a reign of terror. A cold and calculating murderer, he savagely killed as many as five women from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Between 1887 and 1889, he taunted the police, scandalised the Press and horrified the general public, but he was never caught. However, he wasn’t Jack the Ripper.

He was the Victorian serial killer you may never have heard of...

The Thames Torso Murderer.

And his methods were particularly gruesome. He dismembered the corpses of his victims and scattered the body parts along the River Thames.

He used to remove the victim's head, making it impossible to identify her.

The murderer selected women who, in 'The history of crime is like a porthole' the chaotic maelstrom of 19th century London, would sadly never be missed.

Nearly a century-and-a-half after they were committed, these crimes remain truly shocking.

And despite extensive investigations, no one has been able to find out who this heinous murderer was...until now.

Popular historian Lucy Worsley has made it her mission to discover his identity.

Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Express, she says: “The case of the Thames Torso Murderer has always haunted me and captured my imagination.

"I just can't shake these questions. Who were these women and who killed them? Now I'm hunting the murderer down.”

In her new series, Lucy Worsley's Victorian Murder Club, she promises to "finally unmask one of the 19th century's most brutal serial killers".

In this gripping series Lucy explores this historic cold case, testing new theories about who the murderer actually was. She draws on the help of her own murder club a forensic pathologist, a psychologist, a writer and a historian.